No Place of Safety (16 page)

She gestured towards the wheelchair.

‘Was there never any question of your getting married?'

‘Oh no. He had always said “I'm not the marrying type”, but he didn't even need to say it. I knew that.'

‘And accepted it?'

‘Yes, completely.'

‘And you don't feel bitter now?'

‘
No
.' She turned and directed at him an unswerving, challenging look. ‘What you mean is, because my son turned out to have cerebral palsy, I should feel bitter because he gives me so much work. Well, you've got it entirely wrong. I love my son, my life centres round him. It's a lot better than having it centred on a dress shop, when you come to think about it, isn't it?'

‘I suppose so. I'm sorry if I offended you. What happened when the relationship ended?'

‘It ended when his course finished at college. He got a job in Derbyshire and took off. I'd always known he would. I wasn't the only girlfriend he had in this area, by the way.'

‘By then Jeremy was born?'

‘Oh yes – he was about one. In case you're interested, we did talk about having an abortion and I wasn't interested. When I knew there might be . . . medical problems, I still wasn't interested. So please don't see me as a victim, and please don't start imagining any resentment on my part
towards Ben. I loved him briefly, I liked him as long as he was around, and I'm sure I would still like him if I still knew him. I shall go and pray for his recovery at Evensong tonight.'

Charlie nodded, accepting.

‘I'd still like to know where you both were last night.'

‘Here. We're always here. Mrs Marsh next door popped in to watch
Coronation Street
and
The Bill
because her television's on the blink. Does that give us an alibi?'

‘Yes, it should do. I wasn't very keen on the idea of a ten-year period of gestation for murder. Now – about your sister.'

 • • • 

The young man called Splat was a type that Oddie had had dealings with often enough before, but one that still made him feel strangely uneasy. Tattoos he'd been used to all his life, though Splat's seemed unusually flamboyant and all-covering (where did he get the money for artwork of this complexity?), but rings on nose, ears and lips (wasn't that horribly uncomfortable?) he still found repellent, as he did the brilliantly fluorescent colouring of the hair. It wasn't just that Splat made him feel middle-aged, conventional, horribly safe and middle-of-the-road. It was that he seemed to represent some kind of challenge, and Oddie couldn't quite put his finger on what, in himself, was being challenged.

He could almost have predicted Splat's history, however.

‘I was in homes,' Spat said. ‘I never knew me dad, and when I was six me mam just took off wi' a bloke, so they told me. Don't remember her, to tell you the truth – she's just a voice, shouting at me, now. So I was in homes after that. Couple o' times they got me a foster home, but it didn't work out, and I went back to a home.'

‘Why didn't it work out?'

‘I expect it was my fault. I wasn't used to families – didn't know what they were all about. I preferred what I knew. I could be king o' the castle in a home, because I knew how they worked. In a family I was expected to co-operate with the others, and I didn't know how to. Still don't.'

‘How did you land up on the streets?'

‘Easy. Just took off, didn't I? They were getting ready to chuck me out, so I did it for them.'

‘How long ago was that?'

That bothered Splat. Time was something he had contracted out of.

‘Six or seven years. Don't know exactly.'

‘How do you survive?'

A shifty look came into his eyes.

‘Beg an' that.'

He was grateful to Ben for providing the refuge, but he had no pipe dreams about getting a job or settling down and becoming part of the community. He thought he'd probably be dead by thirty ('an' that's all right by me'). He had heard nothing the previous night until all at number twenty-two had gone down to witness the confrontation on the doorstep of number twenty-four. He'd heard nothing after that, though he agreed he could have gone next door, even if the door had been locked, because he had a key. They all had, while they were in residence.

‘We all could have done it, but none of us would. Ben is a good bloke. We all appreciate what he's done.'

‘The chap called Mouse doesn't seem to have been grateful.'

‘Oh, Mouse – he's a basket case,' said Splat, putting a great distance between himself and Mouse.

 • • • 

‘So did your sister know Ben Marchant when you and he were going together?'

‘Alicia? No, they never met. Alicia was married to Joe Newsome then – the father of Paul and Susannah – though she may have been starting the affair with Randolph. Joe was eminently acceptable socially, but extremely unsatisfactory as a husband and father.'

Mrs Boulting then took over the answering. She felt strongly on the subject of her elder daughter.

‘Alicia has very little to do with us, as you probably gathered earlier. But periodically she
descends
on us when the meddling itch has nothing better to feed on, and organizes our lives for us. If it's small matters, we just say “Yes, Alicia”
and wait for her to go away – which she does in almost indecent haste, feeling a great glow that she has “put things right”.'

‘But if it's an important matter?'

‘If it's an important matter, like putting Jeremy into a home, of course we have to fight.'

‘Why should she want Jeremy put into a home?'

Mrs Boulting looked at her daughter. Charlie had a sense of great closeness between the once-beauty and this plain, middle-aged woman.

‘We've discussed this, haven't we, Carol? Alicia doesn't like being associated with anything ugly, or anything disturbing. I'm afraid she sees Jeremy as both. She's always talking about having things done with
style
. It's difficult to have style when you don't have full control of yourself, isn't it? And since she's always trying to bully other people into thinking as she does – she has no sense of other people being different, no sense of the beauty of variety and diversity – she periodically comes down here to tell us how much fuller and richer our lives would be if we put Jeremy into care somewhere.'

‘Instead of which they would be infinitely emptier and poorer,' said Carol.

‘Of course when that happens we have a row,' said Mrs Boulting. She clapped her hands. ‘I love a row. Carol is no good at rowing, and hates having one because it disturbs Jeremy. That leaves a great gap in my life. I fill it up with the church – infinite scope for rows there, thank God, and the only reason I go, because I'm not at all sure that I
believe
in any meaningful way. Then there's the occasional visit from Alicia to satisfy my war-lust. By now you will have guessed that I thoroughly dislike Alicia.'

‘How did you come to grow so far apart?'

‘It happened, as I've said, when she went away to boarding school. Every holiday we seemed more and more to be strangers to each other . . . But, I don't know, maybe it was in the make-up, in the genes. My husband's mother was just the same – a Labour politician who loved organizing people for their own good. It was to have a more disorderly life than
that that George married me. And really we did have fun for a while. Parties and drugs and sleeping around – just like young people today. I suppose Alicia is reverting to type by going into politics, even if it is with a different party. And of course it's the Tories who are the bossy, preachy party now.'

‘The question is, why did Mrs Ingram decide to descend on you today?' said Charlie.

‘Right,' said Mrs Boulting determinedly. ‘And I suspect that on that
you
may have to enlighten
us
.'

 • • • 

Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin believed, began in 1963. It was around that time, in Oddie's mind, that the British lost the art of bringing up children. Bett Southcott was a malevolent, whingeing example of that process in the late stage.

‘No, I don't
have
to be on the bleeding streets,' she said, looking from one to the other of her interrogators with no sense that she was making a bad impression. ‘Or in this bleeding hostel, come to that. It's my cow of a mother. Can't stand the idea of me ever having a good time.'

‘I shouldn't have thought sleeping rough represented any sort of good time,' said Oddie. Once again he had felt WPC Gould stir in irritation on the chair beside him in the dining room of number twenty-four.

“Course it doesn't. It's bleeding rough, and its scary. But I'll show her. Rules, rules, rules, that's all I ever had from her. Well, she'll come round and I'll go back on my terms. She's set my gran against me, otherwise I'd have gone to live with her yonks ago.'

‘So will you tell me what happened last night?'

‘Oh God, last night! They call this place a
refuge
, and you get the same sort of hassle as you get on the streets.'

The events of the day before seemed to have revived in her all the resentment and sense of grievance that had made Katy for one her enemy from the beginning of her time at the hostel. It was obvious she was on the streets not because she couldn't help it, but for a purpose of her own. Either she would achieve it, or she would go back to the genteel comfort of her mother's house on her mother's terms. In the meanwhile she did have one piece of useful information. Her
account of the confrontation added nothing to what they knew, and was marked by her total lack of interest in anyone other than herself. It was for the period after that that she was able to shed a new ray of light.

‘I came in here ten minutes before it happened,' she said. ‘It could have been me that was attacked. I wanted to make some coffee – we've got gas rings in our rooms, but I'd run out of milk. I came to see if there was any in the fridge. Of course there wasn't a bleeding drop. I complained to Alan, who was slumped in front of the television.'

‘Did you hear anything from this room?'

‘'Course I did. The door was open. Ben and that Paki girl were talking. Anyway, the front door was locked when I came in, and I locked it again when I went out. So unless someone else came in before it happened and left it unlocked, whoever did it had a key.'

 • • • 

‘The thing is,' said Mrs Boulting, ‘she rang last night – oh, about half past nine it would be. Said she'd discovered where Jeremy's father was. You'd have thought we'd been employing her as a private eye.'

‘In fact, we'd never tried to find him,' said Carol, ‘and had never even told Alicia his name.'

‘Nor had she ever expressed much interest in “finding” him before,' said her mother, ‘beyond a general expression of the view that he ought to help with the special expenses Jeremy's condition creates. All she knew about him was that photograph, and we took care not to let the name slip.'

‘Why?'

‘Because of her insatiable need to interfere. Jeremy is Carol's business, our business. It was our way of saying Keep Out, not letting her know his name. Then suddenly there she is on the phone saying she knows where he is, that Carol should sue him for maintenance, make him contribute to a nursing home for Jeremy.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Told her to mind her own business, as usual. But she said that from what she'd heard he had had a big lottery win and
kept on and on about him paying a hefty whack for his past sins and for avoiding his responsibilities up to now.'

‘What did you say to that?'

‘Carol took over the call, said “Bully for Ben”, and refused to consider suing him. After a minute or two she simply put the phone down.'

‘But not before she'd threatened a visit today,' said Carol. ‘That was why I put the phone down.'

‘Right,' said Charlie, meditating. ‘But, as I understand it, when she arrived today she had changed her tune?'

‘Definitely. Though she couldn't do a 180-degree turn, because even she could see she would never convince us we had misheard or misunderstood to that extent. But she did her best. Now the talk was all about making cautious contact, telling him about Jeremy, congratulating him on his good fortune, suggesting we meet to discuss his future, and so on. No talk about suing, none of this “he ought to be exposed” rant.'

‘Yesterday she was
News of the World
, today she was Marjorie Proops,' said Mrs Boulting. ‘Of course she was up to something, both times. But what had happened to change her tune?'

‘The matter I came to see her about,' said Charlie. ‘The attempted murder. If it's not by now murder itself.'

The women's eyes were avid with interest. If he went back to Leeds and arrested Alicia they'd probably go for a celebratory drink at the George Washington that evening. Families – Charlie would never understand them.